Andrea Mitchell has built a high-profile network reputation as a hard-driving NBC News reporter. Her title in former President Clinton's inner circle: "the White House pit bull."

But don't expect her memoir, Talking Back, to be a Washington Beltway exposé or a get-even volume. Through all her recollections, Mitchell stays the course as a reporter, rather than leaping into the popular literary world where journalists offer angry opinions and hindsight.

Even Mitchell's ongoing battles with the journalistic and political establishments that consider her a "pushy broad" in a man's world are recounted in low-blood-pressure style.

And such watershed events as former President Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal and President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq are covered with a reporter's eye, away from a liberal or conservative soapbox.

Talking Back is basically a chronological report of a working journalist. Mitchell's writing, for the most part, is fluid as she recounts her wide-ranging NBC News career, which began in Philadelphia, where she regularly clashed with bully-like Frank Rizzo, the city's autocratic mayor.

She went on to become a Capitol Hill reporter, White House correspondent and network chief foreign correspondent, her current position - all of which have provided her insight into most of the world's most important leaders, including U.S. presidents from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush.

In many ways, Talking Back is a refresher course in the major events that have occurred since the mid-'70s. A goodly share of the book is spent on the Reagan presidency and the guiding effect Nancy Reagan had on her husband's political life.

In these segments, Mitchell chops away at Donald Regan, the president's treasury secretary and later chief of staff. He's a man Mitchell dislikes personally and does not respect professionally.

It's obvious Mitchell also had little or no respect for the Southern gentry of the GOP, namely former Sen. Jesse Helms and the late Sen. Strom Thurmond. She recalls telling Helms, whom she was covering, that she had to return to Washington because of the death of Democratic activist Ron Brown, killed in a plane crash.

"Jesse Helms looked at me, smiled and said, 'That's good,' " Mitchell writes.

"I was stricken. I think that was his honest response, unfiltered by the conventions of Washington and the corridors of the Senate."

There is, of course, the personal side of Mitchell's life, which has intrigued many viewers. In 1997, she married Alan Greenspan, chairman of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System, after a 13-year relationship.

Again, Mitchell stays the course as a reporter, defining her life with Greenspan in simple loving terms, avoiding the People-magazine approach.

She does detail the several occasions in which their relationship and marriage created social and professional challenges - even, at times, bordering on perceived conflicts of interest.

Ending her memoir, Mitchell writes: "There is so much joy and excitement in being a reporter. I often wonder how I got to be so lucky."

Luck may have been a part of Mitchell's success, but the underlying theme of her memoir is "gentle toughness."

Dusty Saunders is the broadcasting critic at the Rocky Mountain News.